Wall (35 page)

“He’s sick,” said Marjorie. “Doctor! Doctor Jamieson!”

He did not move, and Howard searched for a match in those preposterous clothes of his and could not find one. He reached over and got some blood on his hand, and he stood quite still for a minute.

“See here,” he said. “I think he’s hurt somehow. You take the car and go on. Get the ambulance. I’ll go back to the house and try to locate that doctor at the hotel.”

But he did not go back to the house. He watched her drive off, her high jeweled headdress on the seat beside her. Then having saved her that initial shock, he hailed the next car. Unfortunately it was the Deans, also on their way to the dinner, and he knew that Agnes Dean had a bad heart. He stood, rather at a loss, while the car lights gleamed on his armor and he searched for a handkerchief to wipe his hand.

“Man here seems to be sick,” he said. “If Mrs. Dean would drive on I’d be glad if you’d stand by. I’ll have to telephone and I don’t like to leave him.”

They arranged it that way. Agnes Dean went on, under protest, and Mansfield got out. He was dressed as an ambassador of some sort, with a broad red ribbon across his shirt front, a row of decorations, and a wig. Also he had matches, and he lit one and looked inside the car.

“Good God, it’s the doctor!” he said.

“Yes. I think he’s been shot.”

The match went out. Mansfield Dean stood still in the darkness, not moving, not speaking.

“If you’ll stay here I’ll go back to the house and telephone for the police,” Howard said. And he added grimly: “It looks like another murder.”

“You think he’s dead?”

“I know he’s dead,” said Howard.

I had not gone to the ball. My visit to New York had left me in no mood for parties. But that was the story as it gradually reached the club that night. The ball went on. The band played, a few of the younger people danced; but there was no grand march that night, and certainly no gaiety. Out on the road a space had been roped off. Police kept the traffic moving, and once more state troopers and the local officers were gathered around a body. At half past nine the sheriff came, his siren going wildly. There were two deputies with him, and he was out of the car before it had come to a stop.

They stood back and let him through, for it was a county case again. He had his own flashlight, although the place was alive with them, and he stood for some time and gazed down at the dead man.

“The doc!” he said huskily. “Somebody’s going to suffer for this if I have to send him to hell myself.”

The place was swarming with men. The police photographer was taking photographs, his bulbs flickering. Detectives were examining the car, the road, the path. Others worked their way through the shrubbery searching for a weapon. And the doctor sat slumped in his seat, like a tired man taking a long rest.

They found no weapon. They found exactly nothing. The wound had been instantly fatal. The bullet had gone through the heart. But one or two things were developed, at that.

He had stopped the car himself. The brake was on. And he had suspected no danger. He had made no move to get out, or to defend himself. Someone had stopped him. He had turned the car to the side of the road, and been killed without a struggle.

“So there we were,” the sheriff said later. “He knew who killed him, most likely; but he didn’t expect it. He was going back to town after seeing Dorothy Martin. He hadn’t even had his dinner.”

No one had heard a shot, but who does hear a shot in these days of backfiring? He had not been robbed. His worn old wallet was in his pocket, the small black book in which he kept a record of his calls. When a doctor finally arrived he fixed the hour of death as something after eight o’clock, but that was merely approximate.

“That was the situation we faced,” said the sheriff. “Anybody could have done it. Only, who wanted to do it?”

Fortunately Doctor Jamieson was a widower. His only son was married and lived in Boston. But his elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Woods, was heartbroken.

“Who would want to do such a thing?” she asked, with bewildered tear-stained eyes. “He had no enemies. Everybody liked him.”

She had some information. For a week or so the doctor had been worried. He had eaten very little, and long after she had gone to bed she would hear him moving about below, “as if he was walking the floor.”

They went through his papers that night, sitting at that cluttered desk of his; an old roll-top with its upper ledge crowded with samples of all sorts, where he used to search for malted milk tablets for me when I was a child. There were a few letters from the son. “Dear Dad: I’m sorry about the delay in thanking you for the check. I’ve been out day and night hunting another job, but—”

They were all like that, and when I heard that, some time later, I remembered the years he had worked, his old mud-spattered car, and his neat clothes, never new. He had forty dollars on deposit when they found his bankbook. But they found nothing else. His professional cards and records, a few receipted bills, the usual blank prescription pad, but that was all.

Open on the desk was a medical magazine, with an article on the use of some new drug or other. He had marked a part of it with a blue pencil. And in the wastebasket, crumpled up and also written in pencil, was the beginning of a letter. Rather it looked like an attempt to draft a letter. It had no address, and it contained only seven words, with one incomplete.

“I find myself in an impossible pos—”

Either he had abandoned the idea then or sent off another letter. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the word was to have been “position,” and one of the detectives spoke up.

“If there’d been a gun,” he said, “I’d say that was the beginning of a suicide note.”

They even debated the idea, sitting around his office that night. He had been worried. He hadn’t eaten. They had found an insurance policy, and he might have wanted it for his boy. Suppose the gun had been in the car and someone had picked it up? It was far-fetched, but possible.

They got Mrs. Woods again and asked her.

“What about a gun? Did he own one?”

“He had two, a rifle and a shotgun.”

“A revolver? Or an automatic?”

“No, sir. He never owned any.”

She went back. She was making coffee for them, cutting bread and butter, and crying as she did it.

“Well, that’s that.”

But the note puzzled them. For whom was it intended? What was the impossible position in which he had found himself? Had he known something so dangerous that he had been killed to suppress it? They went back over his books, but the names in them comprised nine-tenths of the neighborhood, including the summer colony.

When they went back to the dining room Mrs. Woods was there. She poured the coffee and they ate hungrily, as men must eat, even in the midst of death. She seemed distracted, however, and finally she made up her mind.

“I do know something,” she said. “The doctor told me not to tell it, but now he’s gone—”

They stared at her. The room was suddenly quiet.

“That’s all right, Mrs. Woods,” said the sheriff. “It can’t hurt him now, you know.”

She still hesitated.

“It’s about a visitor he had one night a day or so ago. He was here a long time. I didn’t let him in. The doctor did that. He drove him away when he left, too. But they were both sort of excited. I could hear them.”

“Then you didn’t see who it was?”

“Well, I did and I didn’t. Not to be sure anyhow. But they passed the kitchen window on the way out to the garage at the back. That was about ten o’clock. I can’t be sure, but I thought it was the painter fellow; the one who disappeared.”

They dissembled as well as they could, according to the sheriff later. It was a bombshell among them, but they kept on with their coffee and bread and butter. Only the sheriff spoke.

“I see,” he said. “When did the doctor ask you not to say he had been here?”

“That was the next morning. I said: ‘Wasn’t that that painter last night? The one they’ve been looking for?’ He was pretty much upset. He didn’t say it was or it wasn’t. He said: ‘A doctor’s house is like a priest’s, Mrs. Woods. I don’t want any talking about who sees me here.’ Then he looked straight at me and said: ‘There was nobody here last night, Mrs. Woods.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and—well, that’s all I know.”

Nothing of this was brought out at the inquest, our third during the summer. The murder had taken place on Saturday night, and the inquest was held on Monday. It was strange to sit there for the third time, and not see Doctor Jamieson presiding behind the desk. Strange, too, to know that in a few days the room would be filled with children, back after the long holiday.

The authorities were not telling all they knew this time. The inquest actually brought out little beyond the fact and method of death. The unfinished note was not produced, nor was Mrs. Woods called. Marjorie and Howard testified, as did Mansfield Dean. The autopsy had shown nothing not known before. The dead man had been shot with a .32 automatic; the bullet had pierced the heart and lodged in the cushion more or less behind him and to the right. No weapon had been found.

The doctor had visited Dorothy Martin, still in bed and still nervously collapsed. He had left there at a quarter to eight, which would have brought his car to where it was found some ten minutes later. Before he saw Dorothy he had made a call in the interior of the island, at a farmhouse there, and had seemed silent but not depressed. Both places had offered him supper, but he had said he had an appointment and had to get home.

There was no record of any such appointment on his pad. His evening practice drifted in and out, usually without prearrangement. As a matter of fact, the waiting room had been filled while he still sat slumped in his car where he was discovered.

Howard Brooks told about finding the body, and Mansfield Dean of staying by it. The rest was purely routine. The usual verdict was brought in, People went home to lunch, and our new mystery was apparently no closer to solution than the others.

But there was another thing which the police had suppressed. On the car door at the right was a full set of fingerprints, and they were not the doctor’s.

I
CANNOT WRITE MUCH
about that third funeral. The doctor’s son had come, a thin harassed-looking man with a wife and two small children. I could not help feeling that, for all his grief, the insurance money would be a godsend. Practically all the island attended, and the grave was piled high with flowers. From where I stood in the churchyard I could see the other two graves, and fresh white chrysanthemums on Juliette’s, that mysterious weekly tribute which still continued. Then it was over, and the crowd dispersed, leaving the doctor at last to an unbroken sleep.

Just as I find I cannot write about the doctor’s funeral, so I cannot here set down my own state of mind at that time. And as if to add to the confusion and terror, the bells in the house started to ring again. The one from my room to Maggie’s rang that same night. I had not touched it, and the first knowledge I had was the sound of a falling body in her room. She had forgotten that her foot was tied to her bed!

The bay was quiet during those days, for the end of the season was approaching. Mike now brought in early dahlias instead of roses from the garden. The nights were cold, with a hint of frost. The grass was turning brown, instead of the bright green of spring, and there was a touch of color already on some of the trees. Lying wretched and sick at heart in the late summer sunshine I could see now and then the sleek head of a seal and knew that they would soon be back, to lie out on familiar rocks, to bark and quarrel and play, through the long cold winter.

I did not think much during that brief interval. I did not dare to think. I knew now of that night in the doctor’s office after his death, and Mrs. Woods’s statement. And I knew something more. I knew that Allen Pell had been on the island the night of the murder.

One afternoon, a day or two after the funeral, Lucy Hutchinson came to see me again. She wandered in after her usual fashion, looking subdued but also relieved.

“It’s a ghastly thing,” she said. “But at last I’ve got that nonsense about Bob and Juliette out of my mind. When that happened Saturday night Bob was trying to look like a Roman emperor, and swearing all over the place.”

She lit a cigarette and gave me a hard direct look.

“I suppose you’ve heard about the mysterious masked man at the ball?” she inquired.

“What do you mean? What mysterious man at the ball?”

“Not exactly at it. Lurking on the edges, I should say. You know how it is at a thing like that. Masks never fool any one. And we know everybody. He wasn’t really in costume. He had a black domino and a hood. He stayed outside on the terrace. I thought he was looking for someone.”

“He would have had to have a ticket, Lucy.”

“Not if he came by water. Or over a fence.”

“Are you trying to tell me that somebody crashed the party? I don’t believe it.”

“I am trying to tell you,” she said quietly, “that Allen Pell was on this island that night.” And she added, “You can ask Marjorie Pendexter about it. I saw her talking to him.”

I was completely panicky when she went away. Little by little I saw the case against him building up, and was helpless. Then, with a suddenness which almost destroyed me, Arthur was once more involved in the mystery.

Mike was preparing for the winter. He does his gardener’s housekeeping then, tidies up his mulch heap behind the garage, goes over his tools and cleans out the toolshed. That day he was getting ready to whitewash it. He moved out the lighter stuff, and then pulled out the heavy lawn roller.

I was in the grounds when I saw him come outside. He had something in his hand and was examining it. When he saw me he slipped it into his pocket; but I had a sudden feeling of apprehension. Mike was devoted to us, but he was integrity to the unpleasant point, and I did not like the look on his face.

I went toward him at once.

“What was that, Mike? What did you find?”

“It wasn’t anything. How about that iris down by the pond, miss? It’s not—”